Friday, February 26, 2010

Literary Dinner Party

I was having a discussion with some co-workers about my favorite authors when someone asked me a rather strange and intriguing question: if I could invite five authors to a dinner party, who would I invite? And then someone else added that they couldn’t be alive…I had to bring them back from the dead in order to attend.

Well, I only had to think for a moment before answering:

1) Wilkie Collins: because I am an uber-fan and I would love to get his take on crafting a killer mystery - terrible pun, I know. (As well, I’d hand him Drood by Dan Simmons and see what he thought of the characterization – since it is told from Collins’ point of view and takes some liberties with regards to fact vs. fiction.)

2) Edgar Allan Poe: because he was so darn creepy…I’d love to get a taste of his social etiquette.

3) Nathaniel Hawthorne: because I enjoy reading all of his novels and short stories; I would love to hear him speak on the duplicity of human nature and wonder what his take on our modern world would be.

4) Mary Shelley: because I’d like to know what impact her writing had on her role as a woman in her society.

And finally,

5) Oscar Wilde: mainly because he was funny and bizarre and I believe he would add some interesting chatter to the table.

So that’s my list of perfect dead authors to sit and chat with…how about you? Do you have a group of dead authors you’d like to have a dinner party with?

Upon thinking about it, most of my favourite authors are still alive. But this made me think, thanks! 1) JRR Tolkien - To chat about his ridiculously extensive other world history & mythology and how fairy stories are really for adults2) Lord Byron - Because he was gloriously excessive, and to see if he could charm me. Plus, he was apparently the original model for Dracula 3) Violet Trefusis - who featured fictionally in a Virgina Woolf novel for a passionate lesbian affair and mostly to see the person behind this quote: "Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a suffragette, be anything you like -- but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent...Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before."4) Jane Austen - Because I adore her books and would like to talk about her own life experiences 5) Hunter S Thompson - to see the man behind the madness. Or the man and the madness